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REVIEWS 248 of literary obscurity, yet apart from footnotes that direct the reader to Marie de France, the Hisperica Famina, John of Garland, etc., Mehtonen is very stingy with practical examples. Those that do exist in the body text can be strangely dissatisfying. Her discussion of the Tale of Melibee as a model of “prolixitas and obscuritas,” for instance, is spare and in need of proof (111). Dame Prudence is indeed a bit dull at times, but she is very seldom vague or overburdened by rhetoric. The only footnote is to the notes of the Riverside. By and large, Mehtonen’s provocative ideas could have used more elaboration in order to make them compelling. This book will be of use to students of rhetoric and those who are interested in the endurance of ideas from antiquity into the Middle Ages and Enlightenment, but it is recommended only for collections that have access to the variety of texts that Mehtonen refers to in her notes. Her breadth is impressive and challenging, but it seems that sometimes the trees grow indistinct in order to gain a full view of the woods. THOMAS JOSEPH O’DONNELL, English, UCLA David Lee Miller, Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2003) xii + 239 pp. David Lee Miller’s Dreams of the Burning Child is a fascinating examination of the presence and role of filial sacrifice in the formation and development of patriarchal societies. Beginning with the aquedah, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, Miller discusses the inherent anxiety of the patriarchal society with relation to its own basic construction: if motherhood is marked by the visible and outward signs of pregnancy and birth, what, then, is the visible construction of fatherhood? Miller follows, to an extent, the findings of anthropologist Nancy Jay that, as he puts it, “... the function of blood sacrifice is to create patrilineal descent by substantiating fatherhood. Offering the flesh and blood of the victim as a spectacular counterpart to the flesh and blood of pregnancy and birth, sacrifice compensates for the invisibility that godhead and fatherhood share” (104– 105, italics in the original). From the aquedah, in which God takes away Isaac (and, by association, Abraham’s status as a father) only to return him—thus asserting divine control of and blessing over the institution of paternity in the society of which Abraham will become the spiritual father—Miller goes on to apply his keen sense for textual and linguistic subtleties to analyses of Virgil, Shakespeare, Dickens, Freud (from whom Miller derives the title of this study), and Achebe, among others. The diversity of his study is one of its most appealing characteristics— Miller demonstrates convincingly that, despite outward dissimilarities in presentation , the basic notion of filial sacrifice (and its attendant anxiety) maintains its presence in the subconscious of patriarchal societies from the ancient to the present-day. Virgil has Aeneas observe, in the underworld, a parade of his descendants , young men who are both not yet born and already dead of the wounds they have not yet suffered for a Rome which does not yet exist. In Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, Leontes’s madness over his wife’s imagined infidelity extends to his little son, Mamillius; Miller states that, “It is only when the heavens finally strike that he can see, in the dead bodies of his wife and child, divine assurance that he really was a father after all” (95). In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the elder Dombey virtually sacrifices his son to his own de- REVIEWS 249 sires—he wants the boy to achieve adulthood so fervently that he wishes the child into the grave. Miller concludes his study with an examination of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in which he again convincingly demonstrates the presence of the sacrificial son as a key element in the narrative; the main character Okonkwo becomes the instrument of his adoptive son’s death, Achebe’s deliberate reference to an aquedah that makes good on its threat. Miller points out that, appropriately, this sacrifice comes during the unraveling of a social fabric—unlike Abraham’s offering of Isaac, it...

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